The present invention relates to a method of providing a by-viewpoint patent map, which suggests directions of idea developments or intuitively provides various kinds of information about patent documents, and more particularly to, a method of providing a by-viewpoint patent map, which helps researchers to develop a variety of ideas by performing patent searches on patent documents with by-viewpoint classification codes such as F-term codes and displaying the number of patent documents based on classification titles from the search results, and a storage medium where software is stored for realizing the method.
In general, a patent applicant who wants to obtain his/her patent rights needs to refer to and search patent documents in order to decide whether there was/is a prior art or not. Most patent document searches require a keyword input.
Recently, the importance of evaluation on these patent documents which may be used as a standard for measuring the technological levels of research institutions of enterprises, countries, and universities is gradually increasing. For example, the accurate evaluation of the patent levels or directions of enterprises and so on is indispensable to the technological strategies of the enterprises, the investor s investment decision, and the judgment on the researcher s ability, and it is applied similarly to research institutions of countries or universities.
With the recent technological developments, the number of patent applications is increasing, and thus, the quantity of patent documents is also increasing. Accordingly, searching of patent documents needs to be conducted for preventing the redundant researches, or confirming the right infringement, or searching a prior art before filing the patent application, or examining the technological development of other companies, or promoting the research and development. However, the searching of the patent documents is not easily accomplished generally.
In a related art search system for searching or examining these patent documents, a large quantity of unnecessary information may be included if inadequate keywords are selected. In such a case, examining the patent documents itself requires more time.
In order to analyze these enormous patent documents, there are conventional patent classification standards such as International Patent Classification (IPC) or US Patent Classification (UPC). However, since these patent classification standards just simply classify massive technical fields through a top-down method, there is limitations in using them for idea developments.
The Japan Patent Office (JPO) develops and distributes an F-term code classification table based on different classification standards. That is, patent documents are classified by viewpoints. The F-term classifies patent documents by problem, solution, and application fields.